Pages

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

My Top 10 Genealogy Tools

Back in August before I went other the surgeon’s knife I promised myself that I would respond to a post from Pauleen Cass in which she listed her Top 10 Genealogy Gateways.
Pauleen referred to previous posts by US bloggers James Tanner and Randy Seaver and wondered what other Australians would include on such a top ten list. So that I can answer without being swayed by Pauleen's choices I have chosen not to reread her list yet.James and Pauleen took a broader view of the topic by listing both genealogy and nongenealogy tools. I noticed that a nitpicker criticised James for including applications that were not really programs. Randy put forward a broad definition of program that I will use " James used the word "programs" to mean applications that perform a specific task on the computer".I am making two lists of five : Productivity Tools and Research Tools. I have a large suite of tools that I use regularly but these are the most heavily sed.Productivity ToolsBlogging Platforms - Blogger and Wordpress. I use one of these each day these to maintain my personal blogs and two blogs plus a website for genealogy organisations.Evernote - I don't use this tool for research notes but to manage posts for the Geneadictionary and Geniaus' Gems, details of Genimates, for reminders and to store my lists of links.Family Historian - The genealogy database program that is my workhorse. Here I store all my genealogical data plus lists, research logs, photos and documents. I share selected info online from here using the brilliant TNG at http://www.geniaus.net.Google Products - I'm a Google Girl so I use Chrome, Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive on a daily basis for browsing, communicating, recording, sharing and making spreadsheets. I love that I can access this stuff from a variety of locations.Inoreader- My choice of RSS tools Inoreader curates my feeds and keeps me in touch with what's happening in the blogisphere.Research ToolsAs a New South Welshman whose ancestors arrived in the colony from 1813 and didn't stray far beyond the State I use New South Wales and Australian resources most days.

Jill I am interested to see you use Family Historian for your Research Logs. Have you done a blogpost about how you do this in the past. I am searching the site but Family Historian returns quite a few hits. I would like to find a way of linking my Google Drive Research Toolbox and Log with Family Historian. I would be interested to learn what others do.